TV’s Most Perfect Guide to Horror Cinema Was Produced By … Bravo?

Back in 2004, basic cable network Bravo was past its beginnings as a performing arts/opera channel, but they were also not quite to their current state as TV’s most prominent provider of programming about straight women targeted at gay men. In fact, they were only about a year and a half into their rebranding, which began with Queer Eye for the Straight Guy in 2003. But programming was still a mixed bag. Controversial gay dating shows (Manhunt; Boy Meets Boy) mingled with shows like Inside the Actors Studio, Celebrity Poker Showdown, and Showbiz Moms and Dads. Into this changing environment came what remains Bravo‘s most off-brand original programming to date.

On its surface, The 100 Scariest Movie Moments looks like any other cheapo talking-head countdown show. If you watched VH1 around this time, you were likely intimately familiar. While some of these shows dug deep, most of them skimmed the surface of the subjects they were ranking and offered pleasant, flippant commentary that joshed around with the subjects at hand — one-hit wonder music videos; the 1980s — but never really went deep. That is decidedly not what 100 Scariest Movie Moments did. Ranking the 100 best horror movies (or, more specifically, the scariest moments from those movies), the Bravo special took a deep dive into the history of horror. And even better, their wide canvass of talking heads was a fascinating survey of the best talents in the business. The final product, presented as five one-hour specials, remains the single best primer on horror cinema that has ever aired on TV.

Here’s why it worked:

It Didn’t Just Play the Hits

Yes, obviously the usual suspects are here: The Exorcist, Halloween, The Shining. But this list goes DEEP. It plumbs early black-and-white horror like Cat People and Black Sunday, foreign-language cinema like Suspiria and Demons and Audition. Wes Craven’s best known movies are all present (Scream, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Last House on the Left), but so is a curiosity like The Serpent and the Rainbow. The definitions of “horror” get fudged a few times, mostly when the show decided to let the “moments” part of the title give them an excuse to spotlight, say, one particularly terrifying moment in a non-horror entry like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory or The Wizard of Oz.

Only the most intensely obsessed and dedicated horror fans are going to have seen everything on this countdown, which means 90% of the audience is going to walk away with something they need to track down. Maybe they’ve never seen the controversial 1960 slasher Peeping Tom. Or perhaps they’ll want to track down the early Spielberg killer-truck movie Duel. It’s like spending five yours with your most enthusiastic horror-fan friend who needs to tell you about one more movie.

Input from the Masters of Horror

Speaking of which, what makes the 100 Scariest Movie Moments special really pop isn’t just the selection of films. It’s the massively impressive collection of people they got to talk about not only their own movies but everyone else’s. Name a master of modern horror — Wes Craven, John Carpenter, Stephen King, George Romero, Tobe Hooper, Tom Savini, Lance Henriksen, Guillermo Del Toro — and they’re present, talking with great insight and incredible authority on the genre. The thing about a niche genre like horror is that to be good at it, you have to be an enthusiast, and horror attracts some huge enthusiasts. Even Eli Roth and Rob Zombie, two directors whose own horror output has been divisive at best, speak so animatedly and lovingly about these movies. It’s so endearing. Even the more traditional choices for countdown-show talking heads — improv comedians; telegenic young stars with aggressive agents — are so hyped to talk about these movies. And their relative lack of expertise is more than augmented by writers and scholars and makeup artists and any number of real experts in the field. There are DOZENS of interviews on hand here, indicating a project that was undertaken with so much care. It makes a huge difference.

And by the way, if you’re looking for a counter-example for how a show like this could have been done less satisfyingly, check out the “sequels” Bravo made, 13 Scarier Movie Moments and 30 Even Scarier Movie Moments. The films selected didn’t have that discovery factor, and the gallery of experts was drastically reduced … they traded Wes Craven for Zack Snyder, okay? It really makes you appreciate the superior original show.

If you’re a fan of horror movies and you somehow missed this countdown because Bravo wasn’t your bag, you owe it to yourself to track this down. Bravo used to air it every October as a kind of seasonal treat, but those days are gone. It currently exists on YouTube, though it’s an incomplete set (part II got pulled from YouTube, but it’s on Daily Motion). Watch it and let it set the table for two more weeks of Halloween movie marathons. You won’t regret it.